Most people that rely on transcription services these days find it can be a double-edged sword. It’s fantastic to be able to document letters, memos and notes as quickly as you could say them to essentially get them off your chest. However, this is only half the job done. Sending these recordings away for an accurate transcription will enable you to partially complete the work especially if you’re a two-finger typist. However, dictating into a digital recorder or dictaphone often means that you don’t have the structure of the document in front of you. Usually when we are typing, we can see the text appear on the page, which gives us a good idea of what we need to do to ensure it goes out perfectly.
This is probably why lots of people have come to include a disclaimer about the document being dictated in order to forego any errors or omissions. When someone transcribes the spoken word, structure can be a problem, which is unavoidable without the person in the room to readjust the content. Often transcriptions will return to the dictator and require many adjustments and corrections of misrecognitions or self-made errors. Apart from homonyms there’s also a chance of repetition, sometimes even waffling. While this kind of transcription can be very useful for getting the content out from an interview, when it comes to medical or legal practices accuracy is key.
Doctors are constantly trying to get on top of their documentation, seeing patients with many find themselves with a backlog before the turn to products like speech recognition. Being behind by three weeks of notes means you’re having to rehash some of your appointments, decipher scribbles on the page and possibly not being as accurate as it could have been if you’d done it immediately after the appointment. This is why many doctors choose to use Dragon to enhance their productivity and speed up turnaround. It helps them compartmentalise much better, being able to document patient notes immediately after seeing the patient when the information is at its freshest. More accurate reporting is just the cherry on the top.
Using speech recognition software they are able to get the text on the page immediately and some are even able to prepare the document so quickly that it goes out straight after the patient has seen them. The speed and turnaround time makes this product invaluable to any doctor struggling to get on top of their documenting process. Not to mention saving costs of transcription services means that the product pays for itself in a few months. No wonder Dragon has become such a valuable ally to doctors who are required to make copious notes and generate referral letters to keep on good terms with other doctors.